BWHAHA! Microsoft is launching a line a retail stores! Game on, baby!

Word has it that the stores will close randomly throughout the course of the day, and once you're in you'll be required to pay repeated licensing fees if you actually want to stay in the store. Oh, and instead of a "Genius Bar," they'll have a Bring Your Own Parts buffet. :rofl:

WTF could Microsoft possibly sell that other retailers aren't already selling -- probably at far cheaper prices than MS will ever be able to do? I don't get it.


http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/15/microsoft-confirms-retail-stores-coming-this-fall/

Edited to add link.

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I run Leopard, Vista, and XP on various machines. Each has its ups and downs, believe me!

I said they're opening retail stores.

:shrug:

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You're the master.

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:shrug:

Of course you don't know who I am. Because you're one of those attackers who just go after people, and don't let go until the other party says "OKAY! ENOUGH!" or signs off, without ever knowing who you're attacking. You've tied up threads of mine, or jumped all over responses of mine, on more than one occasion.

Just sayin.

Maybe you're cool, how the hell do I know from message board posts? But I know that any time there has been any sort of Mac/PC discussion, you're deep in there.

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Post 1 says MS kind of lame. Post 2 you ask "who said I hate MS?"

Where did someone say you hate MS? Who said you hate anything?

Your OP is rather amusing, thinking of what a MS bar might entail.

That's where someone said it. I don't hate MS. My son makes a nice living writing software for both MS and Mac platforms. I don't hate 'em at all. I just have no need for their products.

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The nostalgia for Windows XP is certainly misplaced, to be sure. I don't think people remember XP pre SP1, that's for sure.

At any rate, I run the latest OS from Apple on several machines. Vista is extremely comparable to Leopard, and in the ways that they differ, Vista is superior in some ways, Leopard in others. Stability is not an issue for either OS, so it comes down to a) speed; b) features; c) software availability.

Reason 'c' is why I've bought two Windoze machines after purchasing my Macbook.

:facepalm:

that's why Federal, State, and local government and the majority of business, waited it out with Windows XP.

I'm neither an Apple nor Windows opponent nor fanatic. I appreciate what both have to offer. For me, I have to stay windows based because much of my exceedingly expensive statistical software requires it.

I not an OS fan, period. I'm a software fan, which is why I stay platform agnostic.

business and gov want to go through that again with VISTA--hence their decision to skip it, given all the problems initially. I hold out hope for version 7, but, we'll see.

Precious few businesses use Apple OS, if that is your criteria for excellence in an OS. Does the existence of XP (SP3, btw) obviate the need for Apple's Leopard? Of course not.

which was the fact that Windows recent OS introductions have not been well received outside home markets and that those who don't go to non-MS alternatives are largely waiting on version 7.

I've been running the beta since January and it's the most stable, best looking and intuitive operating system Microsoft has ever made. It's also a good deal quicker than Vista given the same system specs. I haven't had a single blue screen or system halt since I've had it installed (on two systems, one top of the line and the other with more modest specs). I recently installed the RC and I really can't differentiate it from the beta I've been using. Driver support seems a hell of a lot better than Vista and a lot of my older USB peripherals are truly plug 'n play. PnP now means exactly that. For instance, when I inserted my Blackberry for the first time, I got a little icon of my 8820, I got the "installing drivers" prompt, and about 3 seconds later, it was installed. Same thing with my much older HP Laserjet. And the other peripherals which aren't in the included driver database are typically rather easy to find online. The performance in games is at least as good as XP and now I can play DX10 and DX10.1 games without worrying about the performance hit that I got in Vista. It has all the graphical tweaks of Vista and then some, without the lag I experienced in it. When I'd use the Windows Key tabbing feature in Vista, I'd always get a very slight hesitation before the graphical overlay would come up, and this was on a computer with 6 gigs of RAM, a fast RAID array and a very high end graphics card. Now with Windows 7, everything is instantaneous and that's with every performance feature turned on. One thing that surprised me a bit was when I ran the performance evaluation, both my hard drive subsystem (fairly fast SATA II drives in RAID 0) and my GPU (GTX 285) were listed between 6.5 and 7.0 on a scale which goes all the way up to 7.9. If my system still has bottlenecks with all the time and money I've put into it, I wonder what's required to get 7.9s across the board.

I also waited on my choice of personal computers for an alternative to vista.

Stability improved dramatically with W2000 and XP, giving those who had suffered with the W9s an excellent reason to switch. Even a screwy un-updated original XP release was better than the DOS-based OSes at their best, so almost all Windows users had a high incentive to switch.

That was not the case with Vista, which was not more stable than XP when it was released.

After XP was released, a small circle of Windows 2000 holdouts remained for years, particularly among the IT crowd, many of whom were not impressed by the new features of XP. But smart OS users are a vanishingly small percentage of all users (and I'm not one of them), and the effect was not felt by Microsoft.

Now, the XP people are doing the same thing. Only this time, Microsoft was unable to put any feature or combination of features together which made Vista compelling.

Furthermore, just like Republicans and civil rights, Microsoft either deliberately attempted to inhibit or accidentally inhibited the right to do certain things. User Account Control is an annoyance to most people. Did they ever even fix the slowdown that occurs when one tries to transfer audio and video files across a network?

Microsoft also attempted to use coercion to force users to switch. DirectX10 is a Vista-only graphics suite which offers a modest amount of extra eye candy (originally at a cost of massive framerate loss). Microsoft put heavy pressure on game developers to use and hype DirectX10, in a blatant attempt to force users to switch to Vista. They did similar things with Windows Media Center.

And finally, Microsoft coerced Intel and other hardware makers to approve the use of resource-hog Vista on machines that didn't have the resources to support it. Millions of shitty, lobotomized machines were sold to the public, and those people, many of whom switched back to XP, weren't happy about it. There may be a punitive aspect some of the hold-out as a result.

My husband has 20+ years' experience in IT. MOST of the people that live in our neighborhood work at Microsoft.

When we purchased our laptops two years ago, I told the laptop builder that we were not buying a machine with Vista. We have XP. I'm very happy with it.

The only people who think Vista is ducky are those who work at Microsoft. Period.

(Well, two are technically my wife's, but it's share and share alike for we two!)

I'm also not MS's defender here. Just sharing *my* experience with the various OSes out there. I have Vista on the machine I'm typing on right now. I have a Macbook Pro asleep under my coffee table right as we speak.

If you like, I can switch, and you can tell me if my responses become more intelligent after posting them with Safari 4 for OSX! :silly:

Microsoft can't even sell Vista to those in their own community...

:rofl:

That's funny!

Microsoft: Apple wanted 'Laptop Hunters' ad pulled
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10288022-37.html

It should come as no surprise that Apple isn't a big fan of Microsoft's "Laptop Hunter" ads, but some may be surprised to learn the Mac maker's lawyers reportedly called a senior Microsoft executive and demanded the ads be removed.

The topic of TV ads, which feature prospective buyers comparing prices and features of Apple laptops and Windows-based laptops, came up at the Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans on Wednesday. Kevin Turner, Microsoft's chief operating officer, was at the conference to announce that Microsoft was planning to open its first stores this fall, with at least some of the locations likely to be right near an Apple store.

But the most intriguing part of Turner's speech was when he recounted a telephone call he says he got from Apple's legal department demanding that Microsoft remove the ads. Here's Turner's tale, according to Microsoft's official transcript:

And you know why I know they're working? Because two weeks ago we got a call from the Apple legal department saying, hey -- this is a true story -- saying, "Hey, you need to stop running those ads, we lowered our prices." They took like $100 off or something. It was the greatest single phone call in the history that I've ever taken in business. (Applause.)



Apple Computer Sales Drop to 5th in US
http://legacy.macnn.com/articles/09/07/15/idc.prelim.q2.2009/

Congrats Microsoft.

do they think they are going to improve sales of Zunes and Xboxes through this?

Yes, we have the apple stores. and some Sony stores, but after most of the big box computer stores folded, that basically left only the internet for direct sales. It is hard to test a keyboard or determine how much heat is produced by a laptop over the internet and photos/videos only go so far.

One might also presume they could answer, at least a few windows OS related questions, as well.

you get what you pay for

go for a Mac...simple, easy, sleek, powerful

They convinced business that 'good enough' not best was acceptable.

FWIW, desktop OpenVMS would run rings around anything else for reliability/security and ease-of-use if Ken Olsen
had been able to get away from selling hardware.

MAC's are pretty good as well, but just too expensive.

MS convinced the world that 'good enough', not perfect, was acceptable, so we live in a Windows world, where every other GUI has to at least support Windows 'standard' and conventions....

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they will be better informed than the Apple Store employees at Best Buy. I nearly got into a full-on fistfight with the stupid fat douchebag that was trying to tell me how much better Leopard was because it had this innovative technology-time machine. You know, the same functionality that Windows users have had since Windows Millennium Edition. (2000)

:rofl:

Where we would be without Photoshop?

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Oh yeah. That really helped me track down the problem. Thanks for the complete lack of information there, Apple.

I've had it happen in the middle of a job. No reason, no nothing, just suddenly this black box. It has only happened once or twice on my Macs, but at the office, we have one work station that seems to do this regularly. It's once of the lesser-used Macs we provide for freelancers, so it spends a lot of time in sleep mode. But when you go to wake it up, you get the black screen instead.

I've used both kinds of machines my whole career. I'm a bit handier with Windows since that's what I use at home, but I basically know both platforms real well, going back to early versions of DOS and Apple system 5 or so. Macs are more friendly, even when they crash. But I would much rather have some information I can write down or print or photograph which will help me to diagnose the problem, without necessarily loading up a whole pile of programming/debugging software. Macs are not without merit, but if there's one thing I can't stand it's the concept of 'no user serviceable parts inside'.

http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/07/16/analyst.says.sell.ms.stock/

Analyst: Microsoft "misjudged" iPhone, Google

In a rare move, Argus Research analyst Jackson Turner today reversed his recommendations and urged investors to sell Microsoft stock. He cautions that the market has "shrugged off" real threats to its operating system business and that neither investors nor Microsoft have fully realized that the iPhone, as well as Google platforms like Android and Chrome OS, are shrinking Microsoft's influence. Some effects may not be felt until later in 2010, when Chrome OS is released, but Microsoft now faces a slow "ebbing tide" over the next few years as it loses share.

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All empires fall

like a great many other Microsoft 'innovations.'

:hi:

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Like it was the Red Sox/Yankees or something. :eyes:

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